81

_Improvisations_ 83

Widowers 89

_Fourth Interlude_ 92

Second Marriages 99

_Intermezzo_ 102

Woman & Her Infinite Variety 109

Maxims of Cleopatra 112

_Finale_ 118

Curtain 125

ILLUSTRATIONS

. . . and interrupts him. 23

Places him on a pedestal . . . 35

Married to a human being . . . 63

In remembrance. 73

Half a love . . . 81

You may polish him up . . . 89

A brand new sensation . . . 99

A man just crawls away . . . 109

[Illustration]

FOREWORD

A SMALL phial, I doubt not, could contain the attar of the epigrammatic
literature of all time. Few of the perfumes of this diminutive form of
wit and satire have survived. Pretty and scented vaporings, most of the
thousands and thousands of them, that have died on the air of the
foibles of their day.

Yet how the pungent ones can persist! The racy old odors, which are as
new as _now_, that still hover about the political and amorous quips of
the Greeks. The nose-crinkling ones of the French, more vinegar-acrid
than perfumed, although a seventeenth-century proverb calls France "a
monarchy tempered by epigrams." The didactic Teutonic ones, sharply
corrosive.

The greatest evaporative of course of this form of _bon mot_ is mere
cleverness. Wit is the attar which endures. The wit of Pope and
Catullus, Landor, Voltaire, Rousseau and Wilde.

That is what Rapin must have had in mind when he said that a man ought
to be content if he succeeded in writing one really good epigram.

Helen Rowland stands pleasantly impeached for writing many. She has a
whizz to her swiftly cynical arrow that entitles her to a place in the
tournament.

She is not merely anagrammatical, scorns the couplet for the mere sake
of the couplet, and has little time for the smiting word at any price.

In the entire history of epigrammatic expression there are few if any
whose fame rests solely upon the brittle structure of the _bon mot_.
Martial, about whose brilliant brevities can scarcely be said to hover
the odor of sanctity, is, I suppose, remembered solely a